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NLP 101: There Are No Resistant Listeners, Only Inflexible Speakers

This belief which enabled master therapists like Milton Erickson and Virginia Satir to help people whom other people had labeled ‘hopeless’ is also known as:

There are no resistant clients, only inflexible coaches/ therapists/ salespeople/ teachers

Also phrased sometimes as:

Resistance is a sign of lack of rapport

When Lack of Rapport Led Me Resistance

This was it. It was the moment. I’d been talking with and thinking about this coachee for days, and I’d finally identified his limiting belief, and he was just about to demonstrate it live yet again. I was watching like an eagle ready to pounce on his afternoon snack.

The moment he did it, I delivered the smackdown: ‘Coachee X, is this a limiting pattern in your life?’ and the moment I said that, I could see his face drain and the walls slam shut from a mile away. I knew I’d lost him, and it was my responsibility, because I hadn’t built enough rapport for him to listen to what I had to say.

Why is it that you can sometimes get away with saying the most audacious of things while othertimes you get shut down?

The difference is in rapport.

We all have friends with whom we know we can be honest, crazy, fun, and tell them that yes, that dress does look fat on them and they’d be ok (well, semi-ok at least) with that.

And we’ve also had experiences where the most minor thing we say to someone we hardly know can cause major misunderstanding and unintended results.

As a parent, how flexible can you be to shift your map to that of your child? As a teacher, how flexibly can you shift your map to that of your teenage student? As a salesperson, therapist, coach, friend, son, sister, life coaches blogger?

How Can You Use This To Kick Ass?

Take responsibility is the ultimate takeaway for this belief. When I crashed and burned with my coachee, it would have been easy for me to say ‘oh, he’s just being an ass-err, resistant. Yea, resistant.‘ but that would have brought me even further from my intended outcome to help him break his limiting pattern.

Instead, if I recognize that I can be more flexible than him, and do my best to understand his map of the world, I can better understand him and operate within his map to help him make changes.

If There Are No Resistant Listeners, Only Inflexible Speakers, What Would Be Different For You?

If there are no resistant listeners, only inflexible speakers, how would you approach communicating differently?

A battery of controlled studies in the 80s showed NLP to be ineffective, especially for the purpose of influence. There are many interventions that do work according to controlled studies, but NLP isn’t one of them. Since then the only serious studies regarding NLP have been by social psychology streams who study pseudoscientific followings. They examine NLP groups (among other new age belief fields) from the perspective of how they sell pseudoscience and misconceptions about the mind. Such tricks involve repeating the mantra – “try it for yourself” and “you have nothing to lose”. What’s the NLP response to that fact?

If I were defending NLP, that’d be the first question I’d ask. But luckily I’m not, and I wouldn’t. And because I’m Alvin, I can’t tell you the NLP response, but I can tell you the Alvin response.

Not all of NLP works all the time. There’s stuff that I’ve found very useful and stuff that I found doesn’t work for me. I’ve never used the Parts Integration technique much, but I have used it to help people find solutions.

And while some didn’t find much use in the Meta and Milton models, I have used them to get fine results.

A fine caveat here: some people will sell you the idea that because NLP can achieve some fast results, that mastering the use of them should also be fast. But it took me years to use the Meta and Milton model with skill – these skills are like any other, they take time to master.

So who would I be trying to trick to do what if I say ‘try it for yourself’ and ‘you have nothing to lose’, and if it doesn’t work for you, find something else that does?

Hunt (2003) puts NLP in the same category as Scientology. NLP is mentioned more in cultic studies research nowadays as a cult or new age religion. Social psychologists call NLP a granfalloon (Devilly 2005) that sells pseudoscience using word of mouth testimonials alone (that contradict empirical studies). Sharpley (1997), Lilienfeld (2003) and so on all show that NLP failed controled studies, and the theories have been labeled as pseudoscience. NLP is characterized by naivety at best and at worst fraudulence. I think thats enough research. Basically now, the only interesting thing about NLP is how people get stuck into forking out for books courses and seminars on such a pseudoscientific new age religion.

Well there are quite a few well validated CBT methods. They tend to get presented in a way that gives an accurate idea of their efficacy so you know what to expect.

Understanding social psychology also helps sift the gold from the dross. It also helps to look into the history of other dodgy methods such as Dianetics to help you see the kind of scams the pseudoscientists are trying to pull even now. Thought field therapy and other such new age pseudosciences are good to learn about – just so as to get to know some other cowpats to avoid.

Basically just stay reasonable and avoid anything that looks like a new age religion.

Unfortunately a lot of NLP deserves another acronym (BS), but there is gold amongst the dross.

CBT may be useful for understanding the mechanisms of a particular pathology (not any other aspect including etiology), but the evidence demonstrates that it is not an efficacious therapy (and that merely understanding a problem does not provide any measurable benefit).

Alvin, I like your blog and your attitude. I think we may be soul mates

I dont believe NLP is a scam.. I think it is valid and useful. We know that pavlos studies are valid.. stimulus response, I think Bandler developed a way of creating stimulus response circuits in humans that create useful outcomes. For example the fast phobia cure.. have controlled studies ever been done with this on genuine phobics? The idea that the mind can repattern old stimulus response circuits for new ones is radically different to currently accepted thought, but it actually works.. we learn quickly .. do you know how many people developed fears of going into the water from the film Jaws? this is classic stimulus response conditioning.. his NLP methodology was to use the presuppotion that the mind learns things quickly.. and use it to learn something new,.. he developed this to a fine art, everything he did was to elicit strong feelings and link them to other things.. whether it was a feeling of disgust or anger.. these strong resources could be used to propel humans in a more useful direction… I think Bandlers work is bordering on Genious… study it, try it for yourself

You were quite right, Marty. It isn’t NLP which is a scam but “Headley”, a well-known sockpuppet/sockpuppet master who was thrown off Wikipedia a whilse back along with more than 12 other sockpuppets.

The fact is that almost all of the NLP-critical sockpuppet use the same basic list of references to support their claims. What they don’t say is that:

(a) They have never actually read the material they are quoting. Thus, for example, “Headley” claims that Sharpley reviewed a number of “controlled studies”, though what Sharpley actually said was that “A series of controlled studies … is called for.” (Sharpley, 1984, page 247).

(b) most of the so-called scientific evidence consists of the experiments that Sharpley reviewed. But both Sharpley and most of the experimenters had very little accurate knowledge of NLP. So little, in fact, that they were all investigating a concept that Bandler and Grinder had dropped in the late 1970s in favour of a more flexible version.

I’m glad to see that Headley acknowledges that “Understanding social psychology also helps sift the gold from the dross. It also helps to look into the history of other dodgy methods such as Dianetics to help you see the kind of scams the pseudoscientists are trying to pull even now.”

Because I took my first degree in social psychology quite a few years ago, but having worked in personnel and training for much of my career I have done my best to keep myself up-to-date on the subject.

From that perspective I can confirm that Headley’s nonsensical claims are indeed dross and show a complete ignorance of the subjects he posts about (Sharpley, Devilly, Dianetics, Scientology, NLP, social psychology, etc., etc.)

For example, Headley cites Dr. Grant Devilly as one of his experts against NLP, yet in an e-mail discussion with me earlier in 2009, Dr. Devilly assured me that he had read up extensively on Scientology, and yet knew of NO SIMILARITIES between Scientology and NLP!

The claim that Stephen Hunt has substantiated the claim is also valueless.

In Hunt’s book the section on Neur-Linguistic Programming is almost a word for word copy of a similar piece by another author (David Barrett). Barrett makes no claim to any link between NLP and Scientology, and since Hunt found it necessary to copy so much of Barrett’s piece we have little reason to suppose that he knows anything about NLP other than what he read in Barrett’s book (see http://www.bradburyac.mistral.co.uk/hunt.html to see a word-by-word comparison of what both men wrote).

Indeed, the whole basis of Headley’s claim is one phrase in Hunt’s book: “An alternative to Scientology is the Neuro Linguistic Programme (NLP) …”

Even in these few words there are at least three errors and one major ambiguity:

Ambiguity: What does Hunt mean by “an alternative”? Flying to America is *an alternative* to rowing across the Atlantic in a dinghy, but I hardly think they were in any meaninful sense two versions of the same thing unless you chunk up to some high level of vagueness as “means of transport” or “ways of getting to America”.

Error 1: If we’re talking about Neuro-Linguistic Programming there is no such thing as “the” Neuro Linguistic Programme

Error 2: Given the same context there is no such thing as the “Neuro Linguistic *Programme*. Neuro-Linguistic Programming is a process, NOT a thing.

Error 3: Nor is there any such thing as “Neuro Linguistic” anything. There is a field of study, related to psycholinguistics, called “neurolinguistics”, and there is “Neuro-Linguistic Programming”, created by Bandler and Grinder. But “Neuro Linguistic Programme”? ‘Fraid not. That’s the kind of error someone is only likely to make if they have no real knowledge of NLP – someone such as Dr. Hunt seems to be.

In short, “Headley”, under a variety of names, has no real knowledge of NLP. He simply trolls around the web posting inaccurate information based on information he has cut and pasted from sources whose contents he seems to have only minimal understanding, if any.

The name is a wild claim in itself. The stuff they are promising is total nonsense. I think its disgraceful how NLPers behave. With scientologists, its ok for them to believe. However, those in charge should be subject to ridicule and scrutiny

With NLP, it is decentralized. So those at the “top” are actually the NLP certified practitioners. They are not just believers, they are the priests. They should be scrutinized and ridiculed also. There is no evidence for any of the claims made. Neurolinguistic programming is a scam.